The Archaeology of Central Asia, c. 500 BC – AD 200: Alexander in Afghanistan and
Buddhas in Bactria
Instructor: Dr. Rachel Mairs
Course Description
Central Asia, which has in the past tended to be regarded as a frontier region of the worlds of
the Mediterranean, Near East, India and the Eurasian steppe, is increasingly coming to be
studied as a cultural and political entity in its own right. In the period from the latter half of the
first millennium BC to the early centuries of the common era it was an especially dynamic
zone of cultural interaction. Politically, the territories of modern Afghanistan and the formerSoviet Central Asian Republics (and in particular Bactria, the basin of the upper river Oxus),
became part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, were then conquered by Alexander the Great,
and subsequently became the centre of two powerful local states: under dynasties of Greeknamed kings, descended from Alexander’s military settlers, and then the Kushan Empire,
founded by the descendants of later immigrants from the north. There is a rich archaeological
and historical record available from this period, much of which has only relatively recently
become accessible to scholars.
Course Requirements
Map quizzes (5%); papers, 4-5 pages (40%); review of the TV documentary ‘The Forgotten
Alexandria’ (15%); extended essay and in-class presentation (40%). Students are encouraged
to find a topic for the extended essay which relates to any previous courses they may have
taken on regions which interacted with Central Asia, or which bear on common theoretical and
methodological issues.
Weekly Schedule
1.
Historical Overview and the Sources
For the purposes of this course, ‘Central Asia’ comprises the territory from the valleys of the
Amu-darya and Syr-darya in the north, down to Gandhara, the hill country around modern
Peshawar, in the south-east. Parthia and the Iranian Plateau form its western boundaries. From
c. 500 BC to the mid-third century AD, all or part of this region came under the control of the
empires of Achaemenid Persia, Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic Successor kings,
Mauryan India and the Kushans. These initial lectures, and a film showing, give an overview
of the history of Central Asia in this period; some lectures in subsequent weeks will focus on
particular periods within this (the third century BC, the early second century AD).
An introduction will also be given to the archaeological material from the region and its many
problems; the relevant Classical Greek, Roman, Chinese and Indian histories; and inscriptions
and documentary texts (Aramaic, Greek, Bactrian, Prakrit). (All sources will be studied in
translation.)
2.
Alexander the Great
An overview of Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Central
Asia and India, and the early Graeco-Macedonian settlement
of Bactria and adjacent regions. Alexander faced a hostile
terrain, climate and population, and mutiny among his own
troops. Upon the false rumour that he had been killed in
India, the settlers he had left to pacify Bactria immediately
revolted and attempted to return to Greece. There have been
numerous modern attempts to trace Alexander’s route and
identify sites (especially ‘Alexandrias’) mentioned in
historical accounts of his campaigns. Alexander’s Central
Asian and Indian adventures have also frequently been
represented in modern cinema and fiction.
3.
How not to invade Afghanistan: Lessons from Cyrus the Great, Alexander the
Great, Genghis Khan, the Russians, the British and the Americans (among others).
In a 1962 debate in the British House of Lords on American policy in Vietnam, Field Marshal
Montgomery, veteran commander of the WWII Allied campaigns
in North Africa, declared: “The US has broken the second rule of
war. That is, don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland
of Asia. Rule One is don't march on Moscow. I developed these
two rules myself.”
Do the mountains of the Hindu Kush and vast deserts of Central
Asia make what is now Afghanistan effectively unconquerable by a
major land army? In addition to the strategic mistakes and supplytrain failures of invaders of Afghanistan through the ages, these
classes will explore what effective strategies of control have been
put in place by external powers: including military settlements (and
their tribulations) in the period after Alexander; utter destruction by
Genghis Khan (archaeologically attested throughout the region); the
decision of the Russian and British Empires to establish and define
the borders of the modern state of Afghanistan as a buffer; and war by proxy in the complex
relationships between the United States, the Soviet Union, Pakistan and the Taliban.
4.
The Two Sides of the Coin
Until the archaeological discoveries of the second half of the twentieth century, histories of the
Graeco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek and Kushan kingdoms were written almost exclusively on the
basis of their coinage (see e.g. W.W. Tarn
The Greeks in Bactria and India, 2nd ed.
1951; A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks,
1957).
Following the Graeco-Bactrian
military expansion into north-west India,
some kings began to mint coins with a
Greek legend on one side and Indian one on
the other. How far can these coins help us
to reconstruct the dynastic history of
Hellenistic and Kushan Central Asia and North-West India, and to what extent do the ‘two
sides’ of Indo-Greek coins reflect a real social and cultural opposition of Greek and Indian
identities?
5.
The Third Century BC
At the end of the fourth century BC, Sogdiana, Bactria, Arachosia and north-western India – all
formerly (nominally) provinces of the Persian Empire - were ‘conquered’ and settled with
Greek garrisons by Alexander the Great. Fifty years or so later, an independent GraecoBactrian state under a local Greek dynasty controlled the territories north of the Hindu Kush,
and lands to the south and east were part of the Indian Mauryan Empire. Towards the end of
the third century, the Seleucid king Antiochos III attempted – and failed – to bring Bactria back
into the Seleucid Empire. The young Graeco-Bactrian prince, Demetrios, who was part of the
party sent to negotiate with Antiochos went on to invade India, possibly as far as the Ganges
valley. This session will examine how the changing political landscape and transfers of
territory were negotiated among the powers involved (by war, treaty, benign neglect).
6.
Ai Khanoum
The Graeco-Bactrian city of Ai Khanoum is the
most extensively excavated Hellenistic-period site in
Central Asia (excavated by the DAFA between 1964
and 1978), and certainly the only one to enjoy any
kind of wider celebrity. The architecture and
material record of the city reveals a wide range of
cultural affinities and connections to the Greek
Mediterranean, Iranian world and India. This
session will aim to move beyond analyses which
separate out the city’s most obviously Greek or nonGreek institutions (theatre, gymnasium, temples)
and try to gain an idea of how Ai Khanoum worked
as a coherent socio-economic and cultural
community. There is also compelling evidence for
earlier, Achaemenid presence at the site, and for
later reuse, after the fall of the ‘Greek’ city in the
mid-second century BC. A field survey of the wider region, conducted in the 1970s, reveals in
addition the long-term economic exploitation of the city’s hinterland (discussed in greater
depth next week in the lectures on survey archaeology).
7.
Survey Archaeology in Central Asia
GIS and Google Maps are only the latest survey technologies to be used to locate
archaeological sites and explore how past populations used the landscapes of Central Asia. In
the first part of the twentieth century,
aerial photography was extensively
used
by
archaeologists
in
Afghanistan, British India and Soviet
Central Asia, often ‘piggybacking’ on
major civilian and military mapping
projects. Unsurprisingly, very high
quality military photographs were
taken of the sensitive frontier region
between Afghanistan and the Soviet
Union, and these subsequently passed
into the public domain. Three casestudy archaeological field projects
will be discussed: the eastern Bactria
survey conducted in the plain of Ai
Khanoum in the 1970s, and two more
recent projects in the valley of the
Surkhan-darya,
in
southern
Uzbekistan, and in the Murghab
delta, in south-eastern Turkmenistan.
8.
Business as Usual: Administrative Continuity in Bactria, from the Achaemenids to
the Kushans
Both documentary texts and, crucially, data from archaeological field survey increasingly
support the notion that administrative personnel and existing systems of agricultural production
and exploitation of natural resources were consistently retained through regime change in
Bactria. From the Bronze Age onwards, major irrigation works were maintained in the plain
around Ai Khanoum: these required mobilisation and organisation of labour, and regular repair
to keep them from silting up. Building on last week’s discussion of field survey projects, and
the week before’s on Ai Khanoum, this session will introduce some new material from
documentary texts and inscriptions in Aramaic, Greek and Bactrian, which show how the rulers
of Bactria organised its people and resources. Special attention will be given to the newlydiscovered Aramaic administrative documents, probably from the capital, Bactra, which cover
the period from the last Achaemenid rulers to the early years of Alexander the Great: one
document, identical in all ways to its predecessors, is dated by a regnal year of Alexander: in
the provincial bureaucracy, it was business as usual.
9.
Kanishka the Great
Under Kanishka the Great, in the first part of the second century AD, the Kushan Empire was
at its height, reaching from Central Asia north of the Oxus/Amu-darya through into central
India. His regnal era (beginning probably in AD 127) was used for around three hundred
years. This lecture will begin with an overview of the Kushan Empire and its visual and
material culture under Kanishka, then focus on the personality of Kanishka as king and
innovator. Kanishka implemented several policies which were a deliberate rejection of the
past, and specifically of the Greek past. The evidence of several inscriptions suggests that he
discontinued the use of the Greek language as a public language of government and political
power, but that some bureaucrats remained capable of writing it. In his coinage, the change is
more visible, and more telling: the iconography of the deities depicted remains the same, but
their names change from the Greek (e.g. Helios) to the Bactrian equivalent (e.g. Mithra).
Greek legends are likewise replaced with legends in Bactrian.
10.
Greeks, Indians, Hellenised Indians and Indo-Greeks
The Greek-named kings who represented themselves on their coinage using Indian religious
imagery and in Indian languages and scripts were introduced in Week 4 (‘The Two Sides of the
Coin’). This session will examine the changing political and cultural relationships between
territories of Central Asia and their Greek populations, and the empires and populations of
northern India, through eight individuals:
Seleukos I and Chandragupta Maurya, who
concluded a treaty in 305 BC in which the former
Greek province of Arachosia (modern southern
Afghanistan, around Kandahar) was passed to
Indian control.
• Asoka (reigned c. 269-232 BC), Chandragupta’s
grandson, the Mauryan emperor who set up edicts
across his empire promulgating a new Buddhist
way of life. These included Aramaic and Greek
edicts in former Achaemenid and Seleucid areas.
• Sophytos, author/commissioner of a Greek
inscription, probably from Kandahar, which
makes an overt play on Greek high literary culture.
• Demetrios, the Graeco-Bactrian conqueror of India (discussed in previous lectures), and
the impact of the Indian conquest ‘back home’ in Bactria.
• Menander Soter (reigned mid-second century BC) a prominent Greek king of northern
India, who has a place in later Buddhist tradition.
• Heliodoros and Apollodotos of Taxila (late second century BC). Heliodoros was a
Greek ambassador at the court of a central Indian king who set up a votive pillar to the
god Vishnu, inscribed in Prakrit, at an excavated temple site. His king, Apollodotos,
reigned at Taxila in north-western India, one of the few Indo-Greek sites from which
we have substantial archaeological remains.
Wherever possible, the epigraphic, literary and numismatic evidence will be set in its
contemporary archaeological context, and individuals’ asserted identities compared and
contrasted with what we might assume on the basis of the material record.
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11.
Gandhara and Graeco-Buddhist Art
One of the great unanswered
questions of Central Asian
archaeology in the early part
of the twentieth century was
that of the relationship
between the well-known
Buddhist visual culture of
Gandhara
(present-day
north-western
Pakistan),
which flourished from the
Kushans onwards, and the
Graeco-Roman
artistic
tradition.
Gandharan
sculpture depicted the Buddha in a strikingly Classical manner. Excavations at sites such as Ai
Khanoum to a great extent filled in the gap, and allowed the development of Gandharan art to
be traced back to Hellenistic Central Asia. Some earlier interpretations which saw the art of
Gandhara as the product of Roman influence (‘Buddha in a toga’) were shown to be false. In
addition to stylistic developments in art and sculpture from Hellenistic Bactria through to
Gandhara under the Kushans (and onwards to the great Buddhas of Bamiyan), this session will
attempt to place Gandharan sculpture in its original, monastic context, through the excavations
at sites such as Kara-tepe (Uzbekistan), Ajina-tepe (Tajikistan), Hadda (Afghanistan) and
Taxila (Pakistan).
12. Archaeology, War, Politics and
Cultural Heritage, c. 1922-2011
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Following on from Week 3 on war in
Afghanistan, this session will discuss
archaeology and cultural heritage issues in
the region from the early twentieth century
up to the present day:
• British and Russian colonialism in
Central Asia and North-West India,
and the development of the first
modern excavations.
• The ideological context of archaeology
in British India and Russian/Soviet Central Asia: colonialism/postcolonialism, MarxismLeninism, etc.
The DAFA (French archaeological delegation in Afghanistan) and French foreign policy
1922-1982.
National aspirations and reinterpretations of the past in the Central Asian Republics,
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
War and cultural heritage issues; the Kabul Museum; the antiquities trade (and why you
shouldn’t buy Graeco-Bactrian coins on ebay…).
Doing – and publicising - archaeology in Central Asia today: international collaborations,
survey projects, GIS, Google Maps, 3D reconstructions and television documentaries,
museum exhibitions.